Forgetting the Past

Sunday

Mar 30, 2014 at 6:15 PM

It hasn’t been getting a lot of attention in the mainstream media, but March of 2014 saw the passing of six or so very elderly elder statesmen who guided multiple presidents through the worst days of the Cold War. Its been a true changing of the guard, and frankly I was surprised that some of these folks were even still alive. But on this very blog, Rick was reminding us that at the time these people were already old and wise, Obama was first dipping his snout into the public trough for his first “community activist” job.

Since before the election in 2008, I was asking the question: who advises Obama on foreign policy? and the answer has been—apparently no one with any real experience or gravitas. None of the obits I’ve been seeing indicate that Obama has ever reached out to the surviving architects of either containment or detente.

One of my favorite recent books is called How we Forgot the Cold War; a Historical Journey Across America. When I first read the book, I thought it was a quaint piece of historiography and travelogue of weird historical sites in the United States dedicated to or interrelated to Cold War history. In the past month or so, since Russia has been reassembling its lost provinces, including Crimea, in what Russia calls its Near Abroad, its occurred to me how dangerous it is that Obama doesn’t seem to understand the Cold War, and hasn’t been consulting with the real Russia experts, and otherwise has been improvising a foreign policy with relation to Russia that involves way too much nuclear brinksmanship for this kind of ad hoc policy.

At the same time that the United States has largely forgotten the Cold War, and seems to think it irrelevant, Russia is demonstrating that it has a much older and longer memory. Russia isn’t trying to recreate its Cold War glory days, as so many pundits insist. Rather, Putin is still reliving the original Crimean War, and he acts and reacts on stimuli that arose from the Great Patriotic War. Our presidents as recent as H.W. Bush and Clinton well-understood Russian concern about “encirclement” and militarization. Obama does not understand that Russia simply does not understand Obama’s lack of historic memory, which is why Obama is never going to be able to deal with Russia on any kind of comprehensive level. And, no, I don’t think McCain is much better at understanding traditional Russian thinking.

One of the problems we have in being a mongrel nation is that we don’t value historicism. That’s sort of ok. When it comes to our own country, we have total freedom to replace history with mytho history. And we do it all the time. Our historic vision of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War and so many others is completely untethered from actual historic documents and records. But it becomes dangerous when our lack of historic understanding runs aground against countries who value historic memory as the basis of current action–as Russia does.

Today’s AP headline about Ukraine reports that the Obama Regime remains baffled by Russian intransigence. Well, maybe that’s because Obama refuses to recognize that the whole world doesn’t share Obama’s tunnel vision as to how things should be. Our tendency toward amnesia is not a good basis for foreign policy.

Rob Meltzer

It hasn’t been getting a lot of attention in the mainstream media, but March of 2014 saw the passing of six or so very elderly elder statesmen who guided multiple presidents through the worst days of the Cold War. Its been a true changing of the guard, and frankly I was surprised that some of these folks were even still alive. But on this very blog, Rick was reminding us that at the time these people were already old and wise, Obama was first dipping his snout into the public trough for his first “community activist” job.

Since before the election in 2008, I was asking the question: who advises Obama on foreign policy? and the answer has been—apparently no one with any real experience or gravitas. None of the obits I’ve been seeing indicate that Obama has ever reached out to the surviving architects of either containment or detente.

One of my favorite recent books is called How we Forgot the Cold War; a Historical Journey Across America. When I first read the book, I thought it was a quaint piece of historiography and travelogue of weird historical sites in the United States dedicated to or interrelated to Cold War history. In the past month or so, since Russia has been reassembling its lost provinces, including Crimea, in what Russia calls its Near Abroad, its occurred to me how dangerous it is that Obama doesn’t seem to understand the Cold War, and hasn’t been consulting with the real Russia experts, and otherwise has been improvising a foreign policy with relation to Russia that involves way too much nuclear brinksmanship for this kind of ad hoc policy.

At the same time that the United States has largely forgotten the Cold War, and seems to think it irrelevant, Russia is demonstrating that it has a much older and longer memory. Russia isn’t trying to recreate its Cold War glory days, as so many pundits insist. Rather, Putin is still reliving the original Crimean War, and he acts and reacts on stimuli that arose from the Great Patriotic War. Our presidents as recent as H.W. Bush and Clinton well-understood Russian concern about “encirclement” and militarization. Obama does not understand that Russia simply does not understand Obama’s lack of historic memory, which is why Obama is never going to be able to deal with Russia on any kind of comprehensive level. And, no, I don’t think McCain is much better at understanding traditional Russian thinking.

One of the problems we have in being a mongrel nation is that we don’t value historicism. That’s sort of ok. When it comes to our own country, we have total freedom to replace history with mytho history. And we do it all the time. Our historic vision of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War and so many others is completely untethered from actual historic documents and records. But it becomes dangerous when our lack of historic understanding runs aground against countries who value historic memory as the basis of current action–as Russia does.

Today’s AP headline about Ukraine reports that the Obama Regime remains baffled by Russian intransigence. Well, maybe that’s because Obama refuses to recognize that the whole world doesn’t share Obama’s tunnel vision as to how things should be. Our tendency toward amnesia is not a good basis for foreign policy.